Context: Nia Wilson of SpiritHouseNC has said: all well and good to have protests in Chicago and Oakland, but she needs white people here in Durham to be in the streets. This is the challenge.

We are poisoned by hatred. We are poisoned by industries which do not care about us, ourselves, our communities. Please bear with me.

A lung permeated with coal dust, or of a person with Black Lung Disease, is black like a lump of coal. As the extraneous coal dust infiltrates the living pink tissue of the lung, the tissue becomes stiff, unyielding, dead.

For a hundred years or so, the medical world denied the existence of this killing disease; for there to be such a disease did not “work” with the industry’s need for workers, all of whom had lungs. Following a massive peoples’ struggle, the disease now known as Coal Miners’ Pneumoconiosis or Black Lung was recognized and a federal compensation program was begun.

The lungs of long-time cigarette smokers can also look like this.

I grew up in a household of smoking adults. My mother smoked while I was in utero. I smoked for almost twenty years, from my late teens to my mid thirties. Unfiltered. One or two packs a day. Except when I was pregnant. Because of my children I quit, but I was so addicted that for seven years after quitting when I had a choice, in a meeting or elsewhere, I would sit next to a smoker, so I could suck in a little hit.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the emotions associated with the lungs, which bring pure air into the body and transform it, are grief and loss. In TCM my dry cough might be associated with fire accumulated inside the lungs.

There is a metaphoric pony in this pile of manure (what must we breathe in, to have fire in our lungs?), actually from top to bottom a herd of shaggy, wily, and wild metaphor ponies.

We survive these assaults on our bodies, but they take a toll. When I was young, I could afford to be more cavalier about this.

My lungs, my breathing apparatus, are my point of vulnerability. I have coughed through most of 2016, sometimes coughing enough that I can not speak. Sometimes missing people and gatherings because I was coughing. I am being responsible. I hate this. I am not critically sick, but I am chronically so. I am working with conventional medicine and otherwise (while I have medicare. I still remember my mother’s elation when medicare was first passed).

Nia, I need to get a little more well to fight this fight. This fight is my first obligation, an obligation inherited from my chain-smoking mother. I am gonna be in the streets. Can not let the coughing deprive me of my voice.

I have been writing about ways I learned who I am, trying to write moments in the moment. I was hoping to approach questions of race, gender, and class. These moments happen in context: the grid and grids of power within which I exist. In the end, understanding myself is not enough. I have to see and work to change the context in which I exist.

I. HOW DO WE KNOW WHO WE ARE?

1. DEFINITION

When I was twelve, my mother explained homosexuality: Remember those two drunk men you saw on Christopher. You said they were up against one another, fighting. They were not fighting. They were homosexuals.

2. DON’T TELL

I was a school child

Don’t tell jobs and work.

not even your best friend

and if you ask why,

there is something wrong with you.

Don’t tell about, you know.

Someone could use it against

We could be eaten alive.

3. FILL IN THE BLANKS

Another piece of instruction about homosexuality and lesbianism from my mother:

I was in late high school or early college. She told me about The Well of Loneliness. She said it was about lesbians. She said it was about unrequited love. She said in the end the main character kills herself. She said it was a good book. I never read it.

4. HIGH SCHOOL FOLLIES

We were painting at our easels, the room redolent of oil paints and turpentine. Nancy went to wash out her brushes and the classmate at the next easel said, “She and Lisette were kissing at the party last Saturday.”

“Siciliano?” as if there were more than one Lisette.

Another easel said, “They were making out.”

The easel next to me said, “It was disgusting.”

Thursday. We sat in a horse shoe, working on contour drawings. The door opened. Harry of course. Late of course. People sniggered, yes, actually sniggered, as usual when Harry appeared. He was a pimply sixteen year old with a shock of hair as red as an abrasion, and he wore a soft green crew neck sweater. Everyone knew, if you wore green on Thursday, you were queer and anyway Harry had never made any attempt to conceal his lisp or muscle up on his wrist. He entered classrooms alone. He ate alone in the lunchroom. Some times, he wore a bow tie. I had heard he lived on The East Side, which in Manhattan tended to mean money, tended to mean WASP.

He pulled out his pencil case and set to work. Maybe it didn’t help that he was unskillful and timid as an artist.

“Faggot,” someone said, not too quietly, but below the teachers’ radar. Maybe we wouldn’t have treated him any better if he’d been an artistic genius. It was the late 50s. Though some of our classmates were openly funny, they were otherwise conformist. No one stepped forward to advocate for him. We left him alone as if he were poison because he was flagrant and defenseless and alone.

There was the gym teacher, tall, lithe, with sleek dark hair, gold skin, olive dark eyes. She was a “Mrs.,” but she and another woman teacher were always together and I think maybe someone had seen them kissing or someone had said they had seen them.

There was my classmate Joaqin, tall thin, his shoulders bony, his eyes dark and haunted. It was the era of the female model Twiggy. Joaquin’s art was wispy, more line and inference than the abstract painted blocks and buxom Matisse imitations so many of us produced.

At the senior varsity show, Joaquin brought down the house when he appeared as the popular gym teacher. He did it so convincingly, piling cliche upon cliche. In those days, to declare you were queer, you flamed and ignited the imaginations, hopes, and fears, of the rest of us in our shocking pink turtlenecks and button down shirts and denim skirts and bohemian black tights. Joaquin and Barry, Nancy and Lisette: the faggots burning among us chicken shits, most of us “liberals,” but afraid to step up.

5. COLLEGE

I was at Barnard College when two women were expelled. Two Columbia “men” had scanned the windows of the Barnard dorm with a telescope and seen the two women “in bed together.” The men talked about it in The West End Bar and were overheard. The two women were gone, expelled, sent home. There was no outcry. No one came forward and said, “These are my friends. This is wrong,” or, as was the case for me, “I didn’t know these two, but this is wrong.” The fear of being tainted by association? The fear of retaliation by the college? In this era, a Barnard classmate, not someone I knew, was reportedly sent home. She had brought her horse with her to college and stabled it near Central Park. The college heard that she was dating a groom, or perhaps he was a riding instructor. Quel horreur. Shades of Lady Chatterly. Acting in loco parentis, the college expelled her( and, I assume, her horse).

From at least high school forward, I was schooled: homosexuality was something vague and awful, despite the popular gym teacher and Joaquin’s open and affectionate parody. Its consequence could be life-destroying, even when the particulars of what homosexuality might actually be, were vague in most of our minds. It wasn’t simply high school pecking order and a college’s exercise of power. I was a child of the McCarthy era. I knew that adults had lost their livelihoods and their reputations, never to be regained, simply because it had been alleged that someone was, you know, fill in the blank.

My god-mother grew up in vaudeville, where her father was a star. He sang and danced with a coquettish young woman from France. The French singer spoke no English, so my teenage godmother was charged with teaching the singer English. They remained inseparable, one might say bosom (somehow the theatrical secrecy, both fraught and silly, from a distance lends itself to amusement), friends from my godmother’s adolescence, through her many-decades marriage, until the singer’s death in the 1950s. I remember a Christmas when I was in early elementary school when the singer gave me a child’s sewing machine and I remember the magnetism of her small, elegant person, the choreographed strands of black bangs over the dark saucer eyes, the pearls gleaming at ears and on her hand. The entire apartment, and especially my godmother who usually paid great attention to my sister and me, was focused on the singer.

I remember my godmother standing in the hospital room where my mother was dying, although, that death, too, was unspoken. The setting sun from the Hudson was enameling in gold and red the banks of apartment windows facing us. My godmother said, “The night She died. I knew.” And I, by then a declared and “practicing” lesbian, knew whom she meant.

A decade or so later, I spent a week at my god parents’ apartment in New York City. My Godfather was out of town. He asked me to come up from West Virginia to be with my godmother who was now legally blind. It was the week I ate duck for the first time, sitting over trays in the very French living room which was two steps down from the small platform which was their dining room, outside the minute kitchen where you could stand in one spot and simply twirl around to go from sink to fridge to counter to window to stove and arrive back at the sink without ever taking a step.

After dinner one night, maybe that dinner of Chinese duck, my godmother began to of her mid-teens years, around WW I. She had a friend, a girl her own age and they were very close, inseparable in fact, in their bourgeois childhoods on the West Side of Manhattan. I had known this girl’s name (so talented, so gentle, so fine) from my mother, but never in connection with my godmother. I, the West Virginia outlier, the out but quite ordinary school-teaching lesbian in the room, the mother of two, pricked up my ears. A younger girl, maybe an eleven year old, entered the picture. This younger girl was star struck by my godmother’s friend. This younger girl was my mother, my god mother told me, turning to me with her unfocussed eyes swimming in her lenses. And then the girl, the object of both my mother’s and my godmother’s affection, caught diphtheria and died. My godmother sighed and said no more.

Both my mothers, knowing I lived as a lesbian with a woman in West Virginia, never said a word to me. By 1979, both had died.

II. WHERE ARE WE IN THE MACHINERY OF THE WORLD? LESBIANS ASSAULTED AND/OR KILLED FOR BEING LESBIANS

To counter this history of concealments, I had in mind to finish with an inspirational list of queer women, including my mothers. I began by listing a few writers and musicians like Bricktop, figures like Gladys Bentley, but wasn’t satisfied.

I googled, lesbians assaulted and/or killed for being lesbians. This was not research. This was a ten second button push and yet, here they are, important and human members of our community: people brutalized for who they are. We’ve not come far from that classroom of adolescents frightened by Harry’s undeniable queerness. I want to un-deny and embrace lesbians assaulted and/or killed….

An overwhelming number of people on this list are trans women, and/or African American trans women.

I have been writing about ways I learned who I am, trying to write moments in the moment, without framing. I was hoping this way to approach questions of race, gender, and class. These moments are meaningless without context: the grid and grids of power within which I learned. An end question: how do we change the grid of power.

HOW DO WE KNOW WHO WE ARE?

I.

My Jewish mother, and I suppose my Episcopalian father, named me “Faith,” because giving birth to a Jewish child during World War II, or, as my mother called it The War Against Hitler, was an act of faith.

I disliked my name because it was hard for a small child, like my toddler sister, to pronounce. My sister called me “Thaif.” My mother would sit her down. “Say Faith,” my mother would pronounce, emphasizing the F and the TH with a hiss and an exaggerated pursing of her lips. My sister, she of the dark, dark, eyes would solemnly eye my mother, shape her babyish mouth to mimic my mother and pronounce, “Thaif.” When I entered school in the late 1940s, there were no other children named Faith, not in my class, not in the entire school, not until eight years later when there was one other Faith in my high school.

When I moved into the larger world, people often pronounced the name Faye. The people who did this tended to be Jewish. My mother insisted I must correct people. Her public insistence (though it was my name — not hers ) that I be called by the name she had given me horrified me.

It was in high school that I began to hear: “Faith is not a Jewish name.”

People said “Faith, Hope, and Charity — that’s Christian.”

“It is not. It’s universal,” my mother would sputter.

There were many reasons that I grew up feeling not Jewish enough; my name was one of them.

II.

When I was GROWING UP, this was my maternal family constellation:

my household of two mothers, my sister, and me on Jane Street, on the western edge of Greenwich Village

my maternal grandmother a ten minute walk from our apartment, she in a somewhat grand apartment building on Seventh Avenue between 13th and 14th streets

my mother’s brother Bob and his wife, Elaine in what my mother called Jersey

The last time my grandmother, in her late 70s or early 80s, spent a weekend in Jersey with my uncle Bob and aunt Elaine, she and Elaine got into it. Grandma Spellman was talking about our family in Europe. Some had been button merchants, with branches in many countries; in some countries although Jews were disfranchised, they were required to serve in the military. When a boy was called for military service, he was moved to a branch of button merchants in another country. Grandma Spellman’s version of our family’s line was that in addition to the Dutch/Spanish/British connection on her husband’s side, her family was German. All German, nothing but German. My Aunt Elaine insisted she, Elaine, knew Grandma had Polish blood and Grandma flew into a rage. Both women did. I think my uncle had to immediately drive his mother and her ruffled feathers back to her apartment on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. I’m not sure my aunt and grandmother ever made up, before my grandmother’s death when she was 82.

Elaine had an irreverent and acerbic way about her. My sister and I considered ourselves Jewish, though we knew almost nothing and were taught almost nothing by our humanist mother to help us be Jews. I used to hold this against my mother, but now realize that she born in 1909, the baby of four children, born to prosperous and assimilated Jews who attended Temple Emmanuel — in effect a Jewish cathedral on upper Fifth Avenue —was of a generation of Jewish girls who knew little about their Judaism). When my sister and I were in elementary school, our Aunt Elaine called us The Heathens, or The Little Pagans. She herself had been born Jewish. She did this openly in front of us and our uncle and our mother. She did it with a smile and people took it with a smile. My sister and I stilled and remained silent.

III.

Not long after we returned from living in Haiti for a year, a year of being singular white children in a Black countryside, my mothers decided we would attend services. My mother by affection had a reproduction of a Marc Chagall rabbi in her bedroom. At eight or nine years old, this was Judaism to me. We went to an orthodox synagogue on one of those Greenwich Village streets that cross like creeks from the diagonal of West Fourth to the diagonal of Bleecker and beyond to the roaring trucks of cobbled Hudson Street. I will never forget the door sucking open and the murmur of male voices inside. The oddity of our foursome standing in the entry way: an African American woman, a semitic woman, and two girl children — all four with uncovered heads. Outsiders. I remember no visible women. Places were made for us and we sat, engulfed in chants more unfamiliar than the drums of Haiti, awash in a language we could not untangle, dying for the mortification to be over.

IV.

In seventh or eighth grade my sister and I cajoled our mother into attending The Brotherhood Synagogue, a congregation around the corner from my grandmother’s apartment. The synagogue shared a sanctuary with a Christian denomination. I remember little about this experience except that I didn’t fit in, that my mother was restive during the Friday evening services, and that Hebrew School was very difficult. I was a nerdy little whiz student in elementary school, but could not discern the difference between the various Hebrew letters. I couldn’t. I would struggle in front of the other, glib students, but could not recognize more than a letter or two. Years later, this humbling experience gave me some empathy for my students with learning disabilities. My mother declared she would never return to the synagogue after the rabbi gave a sermon on the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. It did not matter one whit to her that Isaac was not actually sacrificed. Her quarrel was with a god who would ask such a sacrifice and with a rabbi and his religion which would perpetuate the story as an exemplary piece of wisdom.

V.

I went to the hotel room, one of those old and elite hotels on Fifth Avenue near 59th street. I was 17 years old and wearing my heather college admission interview suit and the cheap silk blouse my mother and I had found on a sale table at Macy’s. I had rarely been in a hotel, never by myself. Oberlin was not my first choice, but it was my only out of town choice. I had chosen it because Oberlin was a good school and I liked that it had played a role in the Underground railroad and had, I thought, been the first U.S. college to admit Black students.

When I knocked, the recruiter opened the door. He wore a suit, let’s say a three piece suit. He had pulled the small table-like desk away from the wall and set it in the middle of the room. He motioned for me to sit on one side and he sat facing me. He was tall. I was aware of his starched shirt and, disconcertingly, of the tiled bathroom within arm’s reach.

There must have been chit chat. Maybe I even revealed my admiration for the college’s early integration. Actually, he informed me, Oberlin had not been the first. Polite, I swallowed.

He said, “Miss Holsaert,” and squared off the pages in the folder before him, my papers, my grades, my essay, my application, the references. “Miss Holsaert,” he said, “You are eminently qualified to attend Oberlin, but I must inform you that Oberlin has a Jewish quota and it is unlikely that we will admit you.”

VI.

1962. Mass meeting in Albany, Georgia. The congregation is passionate and participatory and, of course, Black. I had never heard such solemn, chanted and improvised singing, hundreds of voices flowing inexorably over and under and around one another in deep, harmonious currents. Though it was late September, when NYC would have been cool in the evening, in Albany we were sweaty as well as uplifted.

As we filed out into the warm night, a woman from the congregation asked me, “Where are you from, child?”

I said New York. She asked and so I answered, “Jewish.”

She said, “Oh, you are one of the Hebrew children.”

WHERE ARE WE IN THE MACHINERY OF THE WORLD?

But then:

WITH LOVE *

you can hear her heart

she and her classmates

hearts under

tank tops and camis

obey their parents

whose history should but

calls them Never Again

to cone nose bombs

the children know their job

select their crayons with pointed tips

each girl two pert pig tails brush

sometimes at noon they might whisper

their parents’ terrible stories

their cousin who and the uncle

1940s shadow

where do the dead go?

the strange one

she is too much or too little Jew

her parents speak to the Arab bookseller

she reads books which are too old

the strange one with resolve

takes up her crayon

those Arab children will have mamas and bubbes

cooking and rousing and berating

hear her heart beat

urging her to take her place

but urging her to put down the crayon and walk away

by the bomb, her bomb, that is shaped like a crayon

a piece of her has walked away

and a piece of her has stayed

she writes on the grit metal jacket of her bomb

with the wax of her crayon,

writes her namethe name of the Great Grandma who died at Auschwitz

she signs in manuscript, with love.

* having seen a photo of Israeli school children signing missiles to be fired into Lebanon

Gallery of the Streets installation. Because of the art, Kai is being evicted. Because of who she is — insurgent, intransigent, irreverent, principled, warrior — her art has become her house, filling every room with a shifting floor of mulch and sand and pebbles, making each doorway a difficult gateway, lowering the ceilings with ropes and wires from which images hang by clothes pins (“I don’t want my art stuck ON THE WALL”), propping books against the walls in stacks, placing books strategically, bringing in pansies (yes) and other growing plants, banners and scrolls of quotations. Even the closets have not escaped.

Picture it: A multiracial, multi-gendered, intergenerational group of about 250 people are marching down the middle of the street in a neighborhood of North Philadelphia. The people are a loud bunch, carrying signs that read “Free Mumia Now!” and “Stop the Execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal.” Community members come out on their porch to wave at the group or raise a fist in solidarity. There is a pick-up truck with a loud speaker rigged to a megaphone. People are reciting chants that rhyme and have each phrase and pause dedicated to memory. This performance has become ritualized.

There is a lull. The speaker/chant leader is tired and needs a break. He hands the megaphone to me. I am known for my energy. I hold the dubious title of “Cheerleader for the Movement.” Holding the megaphone, I wanted to see if we could transform our ritual. Could we inspire spontaneity and surprise within ourselves and each other? Could we share with this Black, working-class community whose neighborhood we entered, an expansive vision—one where Mumia’s freedom was tied in with their own liberation? I placed the megaphone to my lips and faced the crowd.

Me: What do we want?

Chanters: Free Mumia!

Me: When do we want it?

Chanters: Now!

[reprise.]

Me: What else do we want?

Chanters: [silence.]

Me: No really. What else do we want? Shout it out. It doesn’t have to rhyme. It doesn’t have to be scripted. Let’s make a cacophony of sound, shouting out our visions of what we want. [pleading] We don’t even have to do it for more than 60 seconds.

Chanters: [silence.]

Actually, there wasn’t complete silence.

A culture of resistance, protest politics and institution-building by people of color, feminists, queer people, and poor people in the 1960s and ’70s filled me with pleasure and purpose. It was a period of design and imagination—a period where people re-envisioned and re-structured their lives. Even as a kid, I knew that things were changing. I saw and felt the electricity of change. Nothing was static. It seemed to me that everything was in question: from diet to living arrangements; interpersonal relationships to altered identities, from the ways that people asserted and responded to power to a new articulation of labor and production. During this period, people reached beyond national boundaries and re-defined themselves as members of a global community (and in some cases, interplanetary community—see Sun Ra). And though these shifts were taking place on different scales and at a different pace, corresponding to class, race, gender, age, geographic location and sexual orientation, everyone was influenced by this cultural, social, political and economic re-imagining. This was a transformative moment, one that unleashed our imaginations and spurred our actions. We saw what we could be….

We were unprepared for the brutality of the State. As beautiful as this period was, we were also powerful enough to pose a threat so significant to the functioning of the State, that it systematically set out to squash our burgeoning revolution. Individual leaders were discredited, driven into exile, imprisoned, and murdered. Intra-and inter-organizational conflict resulted in a weakened movement that we are still recovering. Culture was depoliticized and exploited….

My fifth grade school year was also the time of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. As is the tradition, many young people from throughout the country arrived in Chicago to protest the War and other repressive policies and my family and other residents of the co-op apartment we lived in, agreed to house several of these protestors, among them David Dellinger. After Mayor Richard J. Daley gave the order for the Chicago Police Department to “shoot first, ask questions later,” my new out of town “friends” arrived back at our house broken, bloodied, and angry at the police, the mayor, and a system that shoots and kills its children. I was heartbroken to see people in pain and I too became angry. Later that night, I was awakened by gunshots as the police surrounded our apartment and forced Dellinger out of the building. That day I experienced grief, anger and terror—all directly linked to the violence and abuse of power by the State….

This contradiction creates a “raw opposition” that is explosive. It can change the terms of a space. As organizers, our challenge is to identify the nature of our raw opposition and build/create within the space between oppression and freedom. We are charged with entering the space of raw opposition with clarity, precision, and analysis, passion, energy, and generosity. In Black tradition, this is known as the “Cool.” Think Miles Davis.

Mother b 1909, daughter b 1943, grand-daughter b 1970

It is featherstitched, gold, sewn in the hand of a woman who doesn’t ordinarily sew, but she has a grand child coming, the baby far away in her daughter’s abdomen. Detroit. She is featherstitching the edges of fabrics which come from her undeclared lover, African fabrics. In 1970 still a novelty. Some say, unchild-like. Her heart is wild as her cigarette smoke and her stitches for this unborn child. It is a mere four years before this mother’s death.

The daughter walks the edge which in West Virginia can be above the eroded bank, the creek below spangled with orange and blue pollution, or it can be the edge of the night driving home late, willing willing the lover to be there first. The daughter has chosen to be late, because she wants the windows to be lit when she arrives, but the driveway is empty, the country house dark and alone on its point of land. Between the beginning of winter and hard winter, there is the apricot blush of sedge in the bottom land. The shifting edge shapes itself along the spine of seventeen years without her own child, each year thinking, she is 22 years old, now. She is 23. She is 24, and then it is way too later, the absent grand-child is 38 and they reunite.

The grand-daughter for whom the baby quilt was made with its brilliant turkey reds and cerulean and greens and in its center the lavender peace symbol against daffodil. The seventeen years, the daughter has the quilt, but the grand-daughter is gone. The daughter repairs the quilt with gingham, blue ground and tiny flowers, cloth she once used to make a shirt with little heart buttons and little buttoned cuffs for the grand-daughter when she started school. After the absence the daughter returns the quilt and her daughter has it in the Seneca for a while, but when the grand-daughter is afraid, she puts the quilt in a black plastic bag along with the Red Riding Hood raincoat and gives the bag to her brother who lives on the other side of the bay. Briefly she is gone once more. The new shifting edge is the days of not knowing, but the grand-daughter comes through a ward and an untenable makeshift center in an old house. The grand-daughter chooses the Mission. The daughter has the quilt. The grandmother is dead.

In the pitch black mornings of late December and early January, I fell in love with the bounty of Nobel Laureate poet Derek Walcott.*

Aloud, the complexity of his work –– the fabric of music and sounds, the underlying weave of history, the vermillion and gold strands of emotion –– is almost too much for my 71 year old human voice to carry, my ear to hear, my heart to let in. I am struck dumb by the person who has made these poems. I have listened to him on YouTube, his poetry read aloud in his Caribbean English. I read each of his poems, including the one below, and can parse it for rhyme and slant rhyme, for rhythm, for stand-out words and references, for music which could be analyzed. But I don’t.

An essay by Pimone Triplett** on the sublime places Walcott’s work in the context of colonialism; how Walcott’s self-aware (and self as a highly educated colonial in the “Western” tradition) post-colonial use of romantic natural images lets us experience the exhaustion of the sublime; his sublime landscape as the object of exploitative newcomers. It is a subtly but vastly different take on colonialism than what I experience as the self-hatred and sourness of V.S. Naipaul.

The first seven poems stand grouped in a section titled “Bounty.” The ancient Greek Argo sails here and Captain Bligh’s “Bounty,” and paradoxically and intentionally, two European figures of poverty outside the bounds of “civilization:” Poor Tom, or Tom o’Bedlam (the persona assumed by Edgar in King Lear, an imposter of poverty and confusion) and John Clare (the son of peasants, a romantic nature poet, who spent the final twenty years of his life in an asylum). These two are imagined present in Walcott’s island landscape. This might be rich enough material, but the structure of this cloth is determined by Walcott’s mother, who has passed. This bounty is a cry of mourning.

I have seen and loved enormous articulate canvases brimming with strokes and pools of color which, if I were to examine a few isolated square inches, would dissolve into meaningless surface. I have seen and loved massive works which, reduced to small parts, resolve themselves into throbbing, exact, beautifully wrought miniatures. These enameled exactitudes laid one beside the other –– integral to a whole which may be harmonious, tangled, or even at war with itself, the small pieces in their individual unity placed beside others which might be expected to complement, but do not; others which might be expected to war against and contradict one another, but which are eerily at peace and “right” beside one another.

Week day mornings I have been reading aloud to myself. I rise in the dark, eat a quick breakfast and begin: tai chi, the cat sometimes twining through my legs, while water heats for coffee. I go upstairs to my study. I sip my coffee and read aloud.

First, when it was still summer, there was June Jordan’s Soldier, a Poet’s Childhood.

In what fleeting but unimaginably long seconds have I felt my existence, my life breath, at stake? How have I imagined I could defend myself? Where can I find poetry in those seconds so close to death?

Must a poet be fierce? Can I even imagine June Jordan’s ferociousness?

New York City, the ‘40s. Becoming a soldier in preparation for becoming a poet. A musical composition, with the mother and the father as two melodies. She is a toddler, but her father has begun to train her to be a soldier, a little man. Her mother nurtures. JJ as a very young child on the grassy verge outside their projects apartment above the East River; at the same time her father enters her bedroom in the middle of the night to beat her.

Later, two ocean memories are braided: the father takes six year old June deep sea fishing. Preparing the gear, the warnings of danger which could result in the small child’s drowning, the series of 3AM bus rides, boarding the boat with many men. In contrast preparations for a day at the beach, her mother turning and turning in the kitchen as she bakes cake and cupcakes, fries chicken, mixes up potato salad, the beauty of JJ’s mother’s laughter. At the beach, JJ is dashed into the waves by her father, terrified, then rescued by her mother, who carries her back to the umbrella-shaded blanket to feed her cupcakes and chicken and deviled eggs in no particular order and then JJ wanting to be dashed back into the ocean.

At age 7, JJ placed a knife under her pillow, ready to kill her father if he touched her.

The father, Granville, whacks a grapefruit in half with a machete. Standing, he eats the grapefruit, squeezing the last juice down his throat.

The father announces JJ will attend a prep school and the mother protests that the girl is just a child and that she must be with “Her own people, Granville, her own people.” The prose fragments into poetry, perhaps unable to deal sequentially and logically with the father’s plan to free JJ from what he sees as a cage: “No, Millie, it’s a cage: a cage!” The mother says, “You gwine make her afraid to be sheself!/You gwine make her hate you, Granville…/if you don’ kill her first/with you damn daydreams…”

And he slaps the mother.

And the child says,

No, Mommy. Why?Yes, Mommy, no.

If you are a child, and your parents, each of whom loves you, are at war about your very nature, about what can mean life or death for you, at war about from what you must be freed: where do you, that child, find your grounding?

****
June Jordan was not only trained and beaten and sent into a lonely and alien world when she was very young. There were also the near-miraculous moments of safety, love, permission to grow into her own greatness, and awe. Moments when the girl child bursts with exuberance and brilliance:

The first time my father took me to a symphony orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall, it was dark. I was so excited to be up and out of the house at night! I was stunned by so many grown-up people up and outside in the dark. I just couldn’t get over it! Were they all going to the concert? What was about to happen?

And was that was that was that the moon?

Oh, I was so excited! What was going to happen?

My father kept saying, “You’ll see! You’ll see!”

And finally we got there and it was very very crowded and I was afraid I would lose my father but I didn’t and we got to our seats and I couldn’t see anything if I sat down so I stood up and then the concert started and I was looking at all these different men wearing black and white and playing different instruments together and I was about to explode with so many questions because I couldn’t hear the music because the questions crashed around so loud inside my head but my father put his finger to his lips so I’d keep silent and after a while I crawled into his lap and fell asleep. [June Jordan, Soldier: a Poet’s Childhood]

The words of a child who before sleep placed a knife under her pillow.

Amina Rachman and I worked as organizers in the early 1960s with the Harlem Brotherhood Group (National Conference of Christians and Jews) and SNCC. In her rich and complex life, Amina was known at birth as Sherron Jackson, Sherron 10X within the Nation of Islam, Amina Abdur Rahman within Islam, and Amina Rachman within the community of Kolot Chaiyenu where she celebrated her Bat Mitzva in her 50s. Amina made the transition in September 2011. With her children Josh and Sabra and others I was fortunate to be by her side when she passed. I was also fortunate to speak at her funeral.

Good Morning.

SNCC the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is in the house. I bring condolences from:

We offer our condolences to Sabra and Josh, Amina’s sisters, her uncle and her enormous family by affection. Our sister Amina never turned her back on the struggle.

It is significant that Amina had such a beautiful voice, whether she was a teenager singing 50s hits like “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads,” or the adult chanting at her Baat Mitzvah decades later. She was a person to be heard.

There were ugly, haunting truths and entrenched cruelties in our 1950s. These truths flickered across our televisions and filled the newspapers: segregation and racial violence including the murder of Emmet Till, a boy our own age. Inspired by the southern sit-ins, Amina who was then known as Sherron Jackson and I worked with the Harlem Brotherhood Group which was affiliated, tellingly, with the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Amina would become a one-woman conference of Christians and Jews, with two Muslim journeys sandwiched in between.

At that time, Amina and I fell into the habit of calling one another, “Sis.”

The year I went south Amina was a freshman at New York City’s Music and Art Public High School from which I had graduated. She was the first M & A student to wear her hair in an afro. Any time she met a teacher who had also taught me she would say much to that teacher’s consternation, that she – Amina – was Faith Holsaert’s younger sister. She was also moving toward the Nation of Islam and as a teenager presided over the Nation’s meetings at the Audobon Ballroom. In her pragmatic politics and understanding of racist power she was affected when Minister Malcolm X said it was foolish for demonstrators to lay their bodies down nonviolently before earth moving equipment. Amina was one of the people who formed a bridge from SNCC to Minister Malcolm X. She went to Africa with him on his final trip to that continent. On her return she spent a night at my family’s apartment, filled with the hope and danger of those last months of Malcolm X’s life. At dawn she rose and said her prayers on my mother’s rug.

We were out of touch for a while, but in 1974 my mother died. One night in West Virginia I answered my phone. “Sis,” a voice said, “I just heard about your mother,” and we picked up where we had left off, moving into our years of motherhood, our lesbian lives, our adult work. Our love endured five decades, an attachment honored by Amina’s daughter Sabra who was the one to tell me “Ma has had some bad news.” When I walked into Amina’s hospital room a week ago, she broke into that Amina smile. “Sis,” she said, “you came.”

Amina told this story about Chicago SNCC. SNCC workers had underestimated the power of gang turf. There was a confrontation between raw SNCC recruits and a local group. The gang leader opened his razor-sharp switch blade. Softly as an expelled breath he passed the open vertical blade in front of the face of a recruit, cutting the recruit’s eyelashes.

Amina knew danger. Amina knew hardship and she loved people whose lives were hard. She never stopped believing a better world

Amina and her daughter Sabra

Amina at SNCC reunion, April 2010

is possible. She never stopped believing that within the powerful entanglements of race, gender, religion, and class, she would let no one else define her. She was her own woman, lost too soon to the world.

My sister Shai and I were raised by two remarkable women, Eunice Spellman Holsaert, my Jewish mother by birth, and Charity Abigail Bailey, my mother by affection who was African American. At age four, I fell in love with Charity who was my nursery school music teacher. I spoke of nothing else. When my parents went to their first PTA meeting, they said, “Faith wants you to come live with us,” and that is what happened.

The picture of Eunice was taken by my sister’s friend Mehli Gobhai in my mother’s apartment where she was living alone after my sister had moved to India and I to New Mexico. The picture of Charity was taken in Haiti, where we all lived when I was seven.

We four lived together in Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 1950s. At the end of their lives my mother Eunice lived around the corner from Charity who had married. Eunice died in 1974 and Charity in 1979.